moz.net.nz

While I’m playing with blog tools and uploading photos it seems like a good idea to see how easy it is to embed images from my new gallery in posts. Since that’s what I will be doing a lot of.

So, on the left is our post-xmas exercise ride around a couple of local bike paths. Up the Moonee Creek path, down the Merri Creek one. On the right is the November Critical Mass ride in Melbourne.

Then across the bottom is a pile of random images from other things I’ve done recently. Movember,

OK, I still have to go through all the imported blog posts and fix the images and links, but in the mean time I’ve been dumping photos into a gallery for your amusement. Eventually I might even work out how to make posts that appear in the past so I can add random writing and events from history. Eventually perhaps even including everything from my old site (which will stay up, it gets too many hits to make removing it easy).

Gallery Here

So it’s been a semi-work holiday day editing and arranging photos. Have a look, let me know what you think. Thoughts about the blog would also be appreciated.

{update} Gallery is a bit ugly to work with, and the auto-installed version from my host is not making that easier. So April sees me starting again, again, and trying something different. Wait for it… sorry.

For the few days before Christmas our postie wore a Santa costume. It was very cool, but hard to take photos of someone who zooms round that fast.

I’m moving to a blog for content management because doing it all manually is too much work. Hopefully this means I’ll update the site more often. But for a while there will be hiccups as I play with things.

Today was another time I’m glad to own the quad. Since last posting Ben (TriSled) has added a Rohloff and two wheel drive. And 5kg I reckon, it’s up to about 33kg without bin now. But it is excellent to ride now, traction is noticably improved and the Rohloff… is a Rohloff. So nice. I have a 30/50-ish double chainring on it which has a shifter but is pretty much loaded/unloaded gearing. Tyhe hub is geared down about 2:3 before the rear axle so gearing is pretty low. I could put a smaller chainring on (triple) to get decent gears for really steep hills when I’m loaded but I might wait until the warranty on the Rohloff expires.

Here’s me weighing the beastie: (Click for large)

Total about 200kg of load. Felt quite good to ride (the garden shop is a long, gentle uphill from here so coming back is mostly a matter of occasional pedallingto get up slight rises in and overall downhill trend. I still managed to get a bit sweaty though.

More photos on moz.net.nz (Bibble is giving me the shits so I’ve just deleted the index file and left you to it)

My local bike shop have an annual party in the park with food and entertainment laid on. Pics and stuff on my site. I’m slightly sunburnt and very full of excellent food. Check out the photos…

I’ve finally found a flat where I can actually build bikes. We have a single garage about 8m long by 3m wide with brick walls and no close residents. So I’ve started by installing 10 hooks along one wall to hang bikes on (and all the hooks are full, but we still have bikes left over). Between me (three bikes hanging, two not), Phuong (three bikes hanging) and Mitchell (four bikes hanging). Unfortunately that uses about 5m of wall and there’s not much left for the quad and binbike (each about 2m long).

So I’ve bought a TIG welder and built a 2m long workbench that will eventually have a lockable shelf for the welder and tools, but right now just has a vice on it. This week I will hopefully get the shelf and drawers installed, and another shelf up in the garage to hold more of the stuff we seem to have accumulated.

I’ll probably blog more about it, but mostly just update the page at Mozbike where I will describe the stuff I use to build the bikes you see here. You don’t need lots of expensive tools, people like Alex have almost everything you need in a much smaller space and much lower cost, but I’ve been there and done that, and now I want something a little better. At Ken’s place I built One Less Ute in a space exactly 5cm shorter than the frame, with no flat surfaces. It was not fun. Designing bikes to fit around the workshop is a bit of an avoidable limitation. So since it’s my workshop, the bench is two metres long and there’s a decent vice bolted to one end, and a nearly decent vice bolted to the other end. And I have a TIG welder. But I’m going to have to sell half the tools I got off Megan, having two circular saws, two power drills and a router is a bit much.

More details on moz.geek.nz

I’ve destroyed two 8 speed Shitmano nexus hubs so far, they each lasted about 5000km before failing. I’ve decided they are just not designed for people like me. So I’ve got a third one in my commuter (a 26″ wheel On-One “Inbred” singlespeed frame). I’m pretty happy with the bike except for the hub, but putting a proper hub into it would be quite tricky, and I’d have to buy another one (about $2000).

So instead I will spend way more than $2000 on a TIG welder, tools and tubing to build my own. I told you I was a really smart guy!

My plan at this stage is to put my 20″ wheel Rohloff into a forth bike, this time a fairly lightweight commuting frame. Possibly even a frame that breaks in the middle so it packs smaller for transport. If the bike works I’ll build one for Phuong too, as her existing 24″ wheel MTB is somewhat on the heavy side for someone who only weighs 50kg or so.

But first there’s tools to acquire, workshop to arrange, and bits to buy.

I just got email from an italian called Rocco who was inspired by www.mozbike.com to create his own version of One Less Ute. it’s very cool, and I like hearing from people that have done stuff like this with my help.

That’s currently hosted on a site, www.piubici.org that promoted cycling in Milan which he’s helped to set up. In Italian, for those who read that language. There’s cool pictures for the rest of us.

I’ve been thinking about a replacement for MegaTrailer for a while now. MegaTrailer is big and old, and I’ve donated it to Bike Club. Basically, I’m trying to justify spending big bucks on a TIG welder and this is yet another project that will use it

Simple design, easy enough to execute, and should work quite well. I’ve got a proper write-up page on MozBike

Today was a little busy, I had megatrailer on the quad and was biking around the place for a couple of hours. Phuong went to a fan-dancing lesson and found a somewhat overstuffed couch and reclining armchair so we traded up. It’s definitely better than our old couch (also found on the side of the road), which we put out the front and then neighbours in unit one grabbed it.

After our usual lunch at the Addison Road Organic markets (thanks Paul and Fiona) we rode off most of the way to work to pick up a single bed that Phuong found on Freecycle Sydney. That was not huge fun, Old Pyrmont Bridge road is pretty busy and there’s not a lot of spare road space for moronists to go round me safely on the uphills. On the way back we found a queen size mattress so that got piled that on top. Then in Enmore we got a couch-frame for Phuong’s futon base but luckily for me that turned out to be a lightweight steel frame rather than the big heavy wooden one that Kelly had. So, now we have a lounge organised. Yippee

As part of my ongoing (destructive) testing of the Trisled load-carrying quad I’ve been using it during our latest house move. Most of the work was done with a hired van, but we had a heap of stuff that wouldn’t fit in the one trip, and I was keen to move by bike as much as possible. So I’ve been dragging stuff the couple of kilometres between flats (downhill, uphill, down, up, down then steep but short uphill… longest flat section is about 300m). Mostly I’ve been using BinBike because I’m riding that to work every day. That will carry most things, including Phuong’s desk (1.2m long, tied to the rear rack) and it tows megatrailer for the ugly bits (my shelves which are 2.6m long). Of course, we destroyed another wheel doing that because megatrailer has cheap, trashed wheels from found BMX bikes on it.

But I’ve been using the quad for a few things. We got a washing machine the other day, so I took the bin off and put a bit of plywood in place, then rode off the get the machine. It turned out to be one of the new lightweight ones so that was no real hassle, but it attracted a certain amount of attention. Plus the weather has responded to our move by raining with some enthusiasm, so I’ve been using the bins to keep stuff dry as I move it.

This weekend I will be taking it apart and shipping the rear end back to Ben for a com plete rebuild, he’s putting a Rohloff in it and hopefully two wheel drive. That should solve most of the current problems, so I can work on finding new ones

I was reminded today of my early load bikes based on the Long John design. There’s now an online archive of the original designs at www.longjohn.org. My ones were of course a bit more agricultural looking, but they worked pretty well I think. The prototype worked but the steering sucked a bit, there’s subtleties in the pushrod steering that take a bit of working through. I started with the simple, obvious style everyone else uses but couldn’t get enough steering movement to make me happy. After a bit of faffing I ended up with the thing shown that worked better but still not very well.

The final version was called “one less ute”, was made from chrome moly steel and was very light for its carrying capacity - around 20kg of bike could carry over 100kg of load despite the bike being nearly 3m long. The commercial bikes tend to be heavier than that, carry less, and have a much smaller load platform - mine was 1.5m long by 600mm wide. Plus the load platform folded upwards making the bike very narrow when folded, so I could park it in a hallway.

I’m back, I’m working, I’m staying at Phuong’s place while I look for a flat, and I’m about to go to a meeting. So instead I’m sitting at home reading blogs and I found this excellent music video… “Code Monkey” by Jonathan Coulton

Soon I will go to the Bike Film Festival meeting. Really.

Woke at 4:30am for a pee, turned on phone to check time and got another SMS from Robyn hoping I’m ok despite her failure to help. Too early, so back to sleep. Woke again about 6:30am and got up properly. Photo times will spell out exact schedule, but shortly after I started I got to a sign “8% uphill next 5.7km”. Yay.

Sure enough, 7.7km into the day I’m at the top of Cunningham’s Gap and it’s definitely rain forest… it’s raining. I take photos of wet rainforest, wet cars, wet signs and so on. Stats for the uphill: 7.7km, 1:14 taken, 6.22km/h average speed, 18km/h max. I am about50km from Warwick, so will load ap, find raincoat,and venture slowly downhill. If it was dry I’d want to go really really fast, but in the wet with brakes only on the lightly loaded front wheels… no.

Later: turns out that the downhill is only steep-ish for 3km, then there’s a long cruise down the valley at about 25kph with a gentle tail wind. Road surface ranges from amazingly good to appalling, so my speed sometimes drops below 20kph on the gentle downhills! Got caught by a local media photographer going into town, he’s doing one of the “24 photos in 24 hours” assignments so I might make it into the local paper. Hopefully he’ll ring me and I can scrounge copies of the shots, coz there looks like a cople of nice ones. I was a bit flat at that point, bad road surfaces make it hard to stay cheerful especially on drizzly days… wah wah wah, I’m just waiting to go home really.

But I make it into Warwick by 11am, then head to the info centre to book a bus ticket. They direct me to a bus company who can’t help because their computer is down. So I use the 13… number from a phone box. The bike is at the mercy of the driver (as expected) but it’s half price if it’s disassembled… this could be fun. How hard am I willing to work to make the quad look disassembled? To save $27? Answer: not very hard.

Plan for the rest of the day involves finding a shower and internet, eating and trying to stay awake until the bus arrives at 10pm. Yay.

Later: public internet access here sucks. Two options, both are locked down and IE-only, so I can’t upload photos. So I read, wait, eat and read until 10pm, the bike goes under the bus, I go into the bus, I get to sleep sitting up for the night. Yay.

Finally got to see a decent map and discovered that the “no good options” part is true, it’s either crud roads then the Gold Coast, or lots of hills.

Woke into first light, decided I couldn’t be bothered and drowsed until about 7am. Either way, into bed before sunset, alseep by probably 6pm, then not awake until nearly 6am! Holidays!

Rode about 25km into Boonah township this morning, noting yet another “NO DAMS” campaign on the way, and wondered what it is with all the locality signs along the way. None of them seem to have a shop or even a couple of houses opposite each other, but they all get a nameplate. Ah well, whatever. Going into Boonah there’s an 8% downhill” sign but that only got me up to about 57km/hr… taking all that weight out has made a real difference. In Boonah I ambled around wasting time and getting a bit carried away with the shopping. Rang Phuong and chatted, have decided that just biking around aimlessly isn’t really helping, I feel a bit bored and listless. So I’m going to get on the bus soonish and start looking for a flat in Sydney.

Then found decent internet access and $7 got me about an hour. Time enough to find my FTP password and upload the last lot of photos, then paste in the blog entries and spend a lot of time playing with email. Luckily nothing from Phuong coz those take a long time to read and reply to, but she was with me at the time and we didn’t have internet access. Grabbed seom Google maps screenshots as a rough guide so I don’t get quite so lost in the next few days.

The info centre at Boonah also gave me a paper map that has more details at least down to the NSW border, and that is useful. A map with distances and stuff! So now that I’ve ridden 15km out of Boonah and broken the axle bolt in the quad again, I can spend some time typing while I ponder the newer revised plan. I’ve put another mild steel bolt into the axle, so I can probably go another 500km or so on that before it too breaks. Or it might fail in Cunninghams Gap which the highway I’m now on apparently goes through.

So I have 59km through the gap into Freestone where I join the New England Highway which will hopefully have a selection of buses running through it and I can get to Sydney fairly cheaply. I’m tempted to pack up the quad and courier it straight to Ben, but that would leave me with a lot of gear and no way to carry it, plus I don’t really want the quad to be in Melbun. Ben’s building a new back end with better bearings (did I mention that the new bearing is failing already?) and better gearing, but the trade-off is that the intermediate drive will have higher losses all the time, rather than tragic losses every 1000km or so when the bearings fail. Or if you’re a normal user, they’d probably not fail at all

So my plan today is to ride another 30km or so to the start of the hill, or until I find somewhere nice to camp. Or until the sun comes out properly. Or something. Patchy cloud, every time I think it’s cool enough to ride the sun comes back out, but it’s still not all that warm. I dunno, I’m inj a crappy picnic area and it doesn’t feel very restful so I want to keep going, so probably I’ll just ride another 5km to Aratula, then on until I find a camping spot. Phuong just texted to say the greyhound bus leaves Warwick at 9:55pm daily and gets to Sydney 14 hours later. So I can panic and try to do another 80km in … 7 hours, including the gap. Or I can lie back, take it easy, and get into Sydney on Wednesday sometime. Then Phuong goes to Melbourne on Thursday for a week on a school outing. OK, time to pack up and move on.

later: Rode through Aratula which was basically two roadhouses and a motel, didn’t stop. The road was nice though, smotth seal and a decent shoulder. About 5km later started climbing and have been climbing since (a whole ‘nother 5km or so). I’m camped on a “national trail” that has glyphs for horse riders and bushwalkers, and the track quality certainly does not suit bicycles. But, as with so much of Australia, it’s definitely seen a lot of motor vehicles. It gets me 100m or so off the highway and around behind a bit of a ridge so the road noise is not too bad. I didn’t get here until just on sunset, and by now (6pm) it’s definitely getting dark. I’m also definitely up a bit on the daytime level, but right now I’m feeding mosquitoes and not enjoying it, so off to bed.

Stats: 55.7km today in 4 hours, 13.76km/h average and 56.76km/h maximum. 879km total on the odometer.

It’s Sunday the 22nd of July.

Woke as planned, had breakfast at the station then kissed Phuong goodbye on the 5:45 to the city. Sad, but I’ll see her again in 10 days or so back in Sydney. My train doesn’t arrive for 45 minutes, then it turns out that the timetable I have is only partial, or I misread it or something, because once I get off another train goes past a few minutes later. Perhaps I could have gone to the gold coast on a suburban train? Who knows. I wander off down local roads looking for useful signs, but somehow end up looking at the M1 motorway despite my best efforts. I’m somewhat handicapped by having a Brisbane map that ends at Beenleigh then a gap until my NSW map starts at Tweed Heads. So I use info centre maps and “welcome to the district” signs to give me vague guidance. This leads me to see signs like “Beenleigh 7km” about 12km after I’ve left Beenleigh, when I didn’t want to go there in the first place. Bah!

Motorbikes everywhere, it seems that the minor roads make great entertainment for motorcyclists. They pass in one and twos and the occasional swarm. I stop for a chat with one bunch who are standing around a slightly dented motorbike. Not sure of the story, was too busy answering questions about my bike and why I’m riding.

I ride through Tamborine and into Beaudesert, so named because despite it being fairly busy the only things open are servos, and the main event is a meeting of the Monaro club (they all own Holden Monaro’s, going by the big row of them there). I have pizza for lunch (crappy chain pizza) and get my first flat tyre for quite a while in the carpark of the (closed) Coles. I buy fruit and veges at a stall and milk at a corner store, then ride out towards Warwick. That’s about 140km from here, so it’ll be a couple of days. By the look of the map, there’s nothing significant on the road either so I might be eating rice and two minute noodles for a while. But I manage to scrounge a shower and take advantage of the facilities to do a bit of washing as well.

12km out of Beaudesert the cropland finally seems to be thinning out, I see a few stands of trees and find a spot just off the road to camp for a while. It’s noisy though, the road is busier than I expected. But there are farms and fences everywhere, so I’m reluctant to park the quad and wander away from the road. Hopefully the traffic will thin out, I really want a good night’s sleep to recover from all the Phuong-related wake ups in the night. She doesn’t need as much sleep as I do, and is more nervous bush camping, so I get woken up a lot. Last night a possum chewed its way into our garbage bag going after fruit bread crumbs, so about 11pm we both woke up and faffed about getting the food packed up and inside the tent (instead of just in the vestibule).

The major bummer today is that I didn’t tie my washing on well enough, so I’ve lost a sock. I also forgot to turn the solar panel/battery connection on, so I’ve been carefully collecting photons into a disconnected battery all day. Hopefully the battery is ok with that, I’m currently sucking a couple of amps to keep the laptop happy but at least the panel is on so it’ll have an hour or so of recovery charging tonight then more tomorrow. Allegedly the charge controller has a blocking diode in it, so I pulled the blocking diode off the panel but now the meter shows 20mA of discharge when the panel is plugged in but there’s no sun. But Phuong has the soldering iron so I can’t fix that very easily, I’ll just have to live with it.

Stats: 75km today in 5:14, avg 14.3km/h max 57. Total 823km in 57:16 (14.2km/h average overall). Lots of undulating roads today, many long slow sections where I was barely at walking pace. I suspect I’m higher up than when I started as well, so at some point I should get a faster day when I mostly go downhill. Or if I get the bus in Armidale or somewhere I might do the downhill on the bus.

Woke up late, cuddled for a bit, ate breakfast, then Phuong wandered off to find railway stations with disabled access so she can get her bike on the platform easily. Have decided to stay here another day since there are very few people using the track and we’re not very visible from it… and I’m very lazy. So I spend the day reading and sleeping while Phuong rides a lazy 10km or so shopping and looking at trains. Her conclusion is that it’s going to involve stairs, so since I have to get up when she does anyway (she’s taking the tent), I might as well go with her to the station and help lug her bike up and down stairs. We’re both riding quite light bikes now that all the CANC-owned stuff is gone and our “group” gear is mostly gadgets that I’m not willing to donate to CANC (Maurice’s solar panel and so on). I’m down to perhaps 70kg including 30kg for the quad (those two giant bins probably weigh 10kg between them, and suddenly a fairing doesn’t seem so heavy after all). So the new plan is that we wake at 4:30am, pack up and ride to Banoon station, Phuong goes up and down stairs to the city-bound platform and I take the train 20km or so to get out of the worst of the city. The bike plan booklet doesn’t really help this far out in the ‘burbs, there don’t seem to be any coherent routes and the main egress is via the motorway. So, train to Loonlea or somewhere, then ride.

Phuong has hung out with me for the day, and seems pretty resigned to spending time with me rather than on CANC. But since her “week on the Cycle” turned out to mostly consist of riding into Brisbane, hanging out, then riding out for a total of three days of actual riding in the week she doesn’t seem too unhappy.

We camped in the forest park about 10m off a track then early this morning packed up and from 7am sat in the nearby cemetery in the sun cooking rice for breakfast. Then I sent her back to look for campsites while I packed her panniers into the quad then read science magazines in the sun. Ah, sunshine Most of the day was spent shopping for food and reading material - Phuong has 12 hours or so on the train on Sunday to fill in, and I’m going to be slacking around for the next week or so. I’ve rung work and they’re happy to see me back whenever I get back… things are still busy. Megan is still in Sydney, she will hopefully ring me tonight and we can catch up a bit and I might be able to help her out now that I’ll be back sooner than expected.

Came back through the uni and showered in a disabled toilet, with me washing all the clothes I was wearing as well as shaving. So nice to be clean… after a whole one night without a shower. Back in Phuong’s campsite, which turned out to be very close to the one I’d selected in the dark last night. Bizarre, but in a way not surprising as there’s only once decent sealed path through the forest and the quad really doesn’t do very well on narrow gravel paths. So now we’re 30 or 40 metres further off that path from where we were last night. Closer to the motorway, further from the track and quite unlikely to be seen I think. And less likely to be something people care about.

Phuong just got mugged by a kookaburra. She had just cooked two minute noodles when the bird knocked the billy over, spilling half the noodles on the ground, then sat a metre away waiting for her to leave so it could snaffle her dinner. She is not pleased. I expect the bird will also not be pleased when it discovers just how bad two minute noodles taste.

Phuong: Two minute noodles don’t taste bad!!!

All packed up by 5pm and inside the tent after dinner. Now to read and talk for a while.

The plan now is that we ride further out towards the end of a suburban train line tomorrow, then on Sunday Phuong trains into town nice and early for her ride back to Sydney. I will ride south for a week or so by myself and chill out a bit, then bus back. The quad will not go in a bike box, so I don’t like my chances of getting it on a countrylink train. But the bus companies should have no problem with it as it will go under a big bus just fine. Even FireFly or Macaffertys should be able to fit it in but since they have less luggage space it might be tight if the bus is full. I will have to see.

Our meeting doesn’t start until 9am, or 10am as it turns out Beck lied in an attempt to get the group somewhere on time. Phuong and I left early so we could chase train tickets, she’s now going home on Sunday morning so gets to spend Sunday on the train. And she has to check in at 6:30am which means leaving Beenleigh at about 5:45am. Ow! But at least she gets sleep on Sunday night rather than arriving in Sydney just before her first lecture. We catch the group in a cafe next to the HQ and Phuong has breakfast number two with everyone else.

Meeting starts more or less on time, by a bit after 10 we have a plan for the pre-11am checkin, the Evan and Cassie go to do a school visit while everyone else works on the script for the presentation tonight. The check-in is even worse than usual, Valerie starts with a 20-minute dramatisation of her solo ride to Paul’s place from CREEC the other night, which basically means she rejects the idea of minimising motor vehicle use on the ride, she would rather not have to make hard choices. But since the original discussion was framed in terms of sustainability, she can’t attack that directly and instead focuses on the “counting grams of carbon” obsession of certain members of the group, their white male privilege and how that allows them to have better gear and thus an easier time of the riding. June’s talk is more about her struggle yesterday and being made to feel guilty about using the train. People give me dirty looks, assuming I was involved. Beck is concerned that the ride focus more on anti-nuke issues and less on sustainability and other “mixed messages”. Phuong is brief, so am I (we’re running out of time), I mention that attacking straight-white-males is an easy out for the group but also frees me from any responsibility for my actions - it’s not as if I can stop being a SWM. Evan is also unhappy about that attack, but more politely. We discuss the vehicle thing a little, then the group decide that once again motor vehicle use is entirely up to individuals. After this we get into a justification spiral, where people are purely competing for victim status, which prompts Cassie to make a particularly nasty personal attack that is one step too far for me, on top of all the other shit, so I leave.

Phuong and I bail back to Mandy’s place and I vent for a while, then chat to Mandy briefly before we ride off at about 3pm to bush camp near Mount Gravatt.

This is the end of CANC III for me. This sort of uncontrolled encounter group stuff is not comfortable for me, and the personal attacks were just too much. Similar things happened on CANC II, which makes me suspect that this ride will not get any better. At some point I’ll do a more analytical retrospective, and a bit of a write-up of what went wrong.

Sorry to those who were expecting me to ride the full distance.